Colorado soil coughs up the Steve Jobs Time Capsule

As CNET reports, the long-missing time capsule that contained the Lisa mouse Jobs used at a presentation in Aspen 30 years ago has finally been recovered.

Praise the Lord and pass the applesauce!

As the report explains:

For 30 years, a potentially priceless piece of technology history was lost somewhere beneath Aspen, Colo.

At the Aspen International Design Conference in 1983, Steve Jobs gave a talk prognosticating technologies like the iPad, wireless networking, and even the App Store. He used his Lisa mouse to help navigate through the talk and afterward, Jobs added the mouse to a collection of miscellaneous items donated by conference attendees that was then buried as the “Aspen Time Tube.”

Despite the inclusion of dozens upon dozens of other items, the tube came to be known as the “Steve Jobs Time Capsule,” and organizers looked forward to one day excavating it and showcasing the mouse. Except for one problem — they couldn’t find it. But now it’s been found, and CNET got an exclusive look at the video of the excavation.

Long story short, the capsule remained lost beneath an Aspen field, because despite plans to excavate it in 2000, a big earth-moving project messed those plans up.

Fast forward 30 years to last September, and recruit the guys over at the National Geographic Channel’s “Diggers” show, and voila!

Local crews finally discovered the tube last September and quickly set out to bring it back to the surface.

One empty hole later, the crews brought it up. Cameras rolling, they cut it open. “We just freaked out,” George Wyant, one of the two “Diggers” co-hosts, told CNET last year about finding the tube. “We went crazy. Because I’d had a pit in my stomach all day, so it was like instant relief.”

Now you, too, can share in the joy. Just be patient for a few more days:

Now, “Diggers” is gearing up for its season premiere, and its Steve Jobs Time Capsule episode will kick things off on February 25. Check out the video above for the first look at what the show’s hosts, and their experts, found when they opened it up.

1. Steve Jobs did not invent the mouse, in contrast with the claim on the screen at 1:19. Doug Engelbart did at SRI in the 1960s. Steve Jobs saw the mouse in use at Xerox PARC prior to creating the Lisa and the Macintosh.

2. They shouldn’t have taken the mouse out of the plastic bag. They degraded its value by overlaying Steve Jobs’ fingerprints. The inspection comments could have been made through the plastic bag.